Globalization aims to erase territorial borders in order to impose estate-like ones. Geographical, political, or national differences disappear, because States, both in fact and in law, disintegrate, homogenizing people, customs, and objectives, and neutralizing, of course, human freedoms as well. For the differences—ever increasing—are now estate-based, social, financial. And they will become even more radical, until the abyss between rich and poor proves entirely impassable.
We no longer live in countries, but in political systems homogenized across diverse and distant geographies. We live, in reality, in a world of invisible frontiers. They are perhaps the cruelest of all limitations, for a very simple reason: they make us lose awareness of who we are and what we need; that is, they deprive us of knowledge of difference—and of recognition of equality. Our children will not know who they are, nor where they are, nor for whom they work.
Meanwhile, the human being of the twenty-first century—and I refer specifically to those who live and survive in the so-called democratic Western societies—does nothing but play at being childishly surprised by the consequences of his own irresponsibilities. He lives, in truth, within the idealism that, with globalist and mercantile pretensions, has been designed by the Anglosphere.
When we encounter someone who collects four-leaf clovers, claims to draw circumferences of infinite radius with both hands, or asserts that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote inspired by the commercial law of the Nibelungs, we are not simply faced with a three-headed adynaton, but with something far more elementary and common. We are faced with a password, a watchword. Such a thing is not an argument or an opinion. It is the sign and countersign that our interlocutor speaks, writes, and lives in a third semantic world—and does not know it.
In certain contexts, to argue against nonsense is to become part of it. From this perspective, opinion—which is the virus of ignorance—devours absolutely everything.
In the twenty-first century, Western democracies—in reality almost the only ones—dissolve into absurd ideologies, institutionally represented by ignorant politicians, incompetent professionals, or useless rulers. The global market supplants the State and renders irrelevant whatever emerges from the ballot boxes in any electoral process, because it makes no difference who governs: the one who rules is the market. Democracy is now a puppet in the hands of international commerce.
And it is so because the market is more competent than the State. Executives and commercial professionals are far better prepared than the politicians who claim to serve democracy. And they are far more hardworking and responsible than politicians, whether we like to admit it or not. The friends of commerce work much harder at their jobs than the friends of democracy do at theirs. Financial elites take care of their interests much more—and much better—than the people do of theirs. Today the people seem to have forgotten themselves and to have lost sight of their political role and protagonism in this world.
Some of the chapters in this book are the result of lectures delivered orally at different universities and academic institutions; therefore, in their textual transcription they preserve the original tone of living and direct discourse.
Taken as a whole, the volume seeks to offer a reflection removed from internet quarrels and demanding of highly cautious personal considerations, which press upon the sore point of human rationalism in search of political forms capable of preserving freedom in a world globalized by the market—where ideologies continue to speak of democracy and equality while money irreversibly hierarchizes life.
The frontiers of globalization are extremely silent and invisible. The senses do not perceive them clearly. But our pockets do.
The democracy of the twenty-first century stands before—unfulfilled—all the promises of the European Enlightenment: perpetual peace, equality before the law, the genuine separation of the three political powers, the secularization of human life vis-à-vis religious and ecclesiastical institutions, the defense of private property, the right to individual liberty, and the stellar and idealized goal of happiness. The Enlightenment failed to fulfill all its promises. Not a single one of its postmodern advocates declares this open secret, which no one dares to mention. And everyone knows it.
Will democracy be able to pay for the broken dishes of the Europeanist and Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment? Sometimes, in order to be able, one must also be willing. It would undoubtedly be most regrettable if future historians were to have reason to conclude that twenty-first-century democracy was the failure of the Enlightenment: the imperfect objective of materializing a project that was ill-fated and unfortunate from its very idealistic and totalitarian conception. The Enlightenment is the executioner of democracy.
And I am concerned that, under this Enlightened imperative, democracy in the twenty-first century may become the executioner of its own population. If in former times martyrdom was the only form of suicide authorized by religions, today war seems to be the only form of homicide legitimized by democracies. Twenty-first-century Europe invites its young people to go to war. Why? Let the youngest answer this question—since I am interested only in what those compelled to fight in a war they have not provoked may say—but let them answer with words, not with their lives. Often, and though it may not seem so, courage is shown more through words than through deeds. Above all in a society where freedom of action is neutralized and freedom of speech is increasingly proscribed and curtailed, in the name of languages incompatible with the human rationalism of intelligent persons and, of course, incompatible with reality.
I insist bluntly that if the twenty-first century has taught us anything in its first twenty-five years of history, it is that the Enlightenment is the executioner of democracy, and that along this path democracy itself might paradoxically become the executioner of its population. Will that be one of the results of the invisible frontiers of globalization? Time will tell.
Jesús G. Maestro
